Ulrich Koert and co-workers at Philipps-Universität Marburg have reported in Chemical Communications on a diastereoselective displacement of a bromide – the dispacement is directed by a nearby hydroxyl group.

Dennis Curran (Pitt) and Armido Studer (Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat) and co-workers have reported in JACS on a radical cascade cyclization where two diastereotopic iodidines in the precursor substrate are involved.

Sarah Reisman and co-workers have reported in ACIEE on their total syntheses of some hasubanan alkaloids. Add an “a” and it sounds like hasubanana.

You know all of this total synthesis made me start thinking how science is evolutionary – in other words, there will always be some advancement in our field and people will publish a new paper here and there from their new findings…but there’s another aspect when way back in the day it was fine to just publish a paper and if someone were to try to publish that 20 years later, they would probably have a hard time getting it accepted.

I guess what I’m getting at is: will there one day be a step above today where all total synthesis papers will have to be accompanied by biological studies? For the most part – all isolation papers are accompanied by bioassays of some sort so I wouldn’t be surprised if this does happen. But then again, that would be forcing a chemist to turn into a biologist or making friends with biologists…also to quote Phil Baran from an NIH interview: “…we get to focus on the chemistry we love to do, and then when we’re done, we let others focus on what they love to do”